In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face. That is a rather startling thing to say, but it is our conclusion.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that technological advances will enhance machine communication to a point where it surpasses human interaction.
J. C. R. Licklider's quote expresses a visionary perspective on the future of communication, indicating that technological advancements will enable machines to facilitate communication in ways that are more effective than traditional face-to-face interactions. This implies a significant transformation in how people relate and interact, raising questions about the implications of machine-mediated communication on personal connections and social dynamics.
In practice
In a tech seminar discussing the future of AI-enhanced communication.
The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.
EMACS could not have been reached by a process of careful design, because such processes arrive only at goals which are visible at the outset, and whose desirability is established on the bottom line at the outset. Neither I nor anyone else visualized an extensible editor until I had made one, nor appreciated its value until he had experienced it. EMACS exists because I felt free to make individually useful small improvements on a path whose end was not in sight.
I am not anti-technology; I am pro-conversation.
Software is eating the world, but AI is going to eat software.
Calling 'Instagram' a photo-sharing app is like calling a newspaper a letter-sharing book, or a Mozart grand era symphony a series of notes. 'Instagram' is less about the medium and more about the network.
New technologies, however remarkable they might seem, are fundamentally just tools made by people for people.
The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.
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